Internet use increases well-being and life satisfaction, despite public concerns about its effects, a major study shows
Using the internet boosts people’s well-being and increases life satisfaction, a study suggests.
Despite public concerns to the contrary, researchers from the University of Oxford say going online appears to be having a largely positive impact.
Their comments come after analyzing data from 2 million people aged 15 to 99 in 168 countries.
They found that across all countries, life satisfaction was 8.5 percent higher for those who had access to the internet and their positive experiences were 8.3 percent higher.
Based on more than 33,000 different statistical models and subsets of data, the researchers found that 84.9 percent of the associations between internet connectivity and well-being were positive.
Professor Andrew Przybylski (pictured) from the Oxford Internet Institute has discovered that the internet improves people’s well-being
Andrew Przybylski, professor of human behavior and technology at the Oxford Internet Institute, said: ‘Overall, we found that the mean associations were consistent between predictors of internet adoption and wellbeing outcomes, with those who had access to the internet or actively used the internet having a meaningful reported greater well-being than those who did not.
‘We hope our findings provide more context to the screen time debate, but further work is still needed in this important area.’
He added that he believed there would come a time when people would no longer worry about young people’s use of social media and the internet because they would worry about the next thing that comes along.
Assistant Professor Matti Vuorre from Tilburg University, and former research associate at OII, said: ‘We were surprised to find a positive correlation between well-being and internet use in the majority of the thousands of models we used for our analysis.’
The study measured well-being using eight indicators: satisfaction with life, daily negative and positive experiences, two measures of social well-being (well-being linked to liking where you live and feeling safe there), physical well-being, community well-being and experiences of meaning.
Factors such as education, income and health were also taken into account, but the study did not look at social media use.
Despite public concerns to the contrary, researchers have found that going online appears to have a largely positive impact
In the study, published in the American Psychological Association’s journal Technology, Mind and Behavior, researchers used data from the Gallup World Poll of 2,414,294 people from 168 countries, from 2006-2021.
The poll assessed well-being with in-person and telephone surveys asking questions such as ‘Does your home have access to the internet?’, and asked about positive or negative experiences and life satisfaction.
Although the associations between internet access and internet use were consistently positive for the average country, the researchers did find some variation by gender and well-being.
They found that 4.9 percent of the associations linking internet use and community well-being were negative, with most of these associations observed in women between the ages of 15 and 24 years old.
Professor Przybylski said: ‘It’s a bit cliché, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
‘And if we want to make the online world safer for young people, we cannot start with strong beliefs and ready-made solutions.
“We really need to make sure that we’re sensitive to data changing our minds, and I really hope that message gets across rather than just another salvo, in another silly debate.”